An article on SocialTwister.com, "The Coming of the Database Economy - Hold Onto Your Opinions", reminded me of social science stuff I was reading on trust. Trust, as some has theorised(*), is what we use when faced with the challenge of managing life's complexities. And reputational information is an important factor when deciding whether an info source is trustworthy. In the context of online information, as the SocialTwister posting said:
... When there are millions upon millions of points of data to consider, knowing which the best is becomes far more important.
... What drives the value of Amazon, for example? In the beginning, it was simply enough to have the database of books since no one else had it. What pushes me back to Amazon, more often than not, however, is not the database (I assume everyone has it now). I am drawn in by things like the User Reviews and Ratings, not to mention, the Recommended Reading lists and other hooks like that. Given too many choices, I often find myself polling constantly for external benchmarks to evaluate with.
Thus it makes sense that the explosive interest (in research, development and usage) of reputation/trust systems should happen now. The amount of information online has crossed the line from scarce or even managable to just purely overwhelming. Users are not just connecting to information, but also to people, places and contexts. Information is not just avaiable from well known centralised repositories but from any connected machine, devices and even objects.
Something is needed to manage all this complexity, and the user has called on her trusted tools - reputational information and trust.
* see, for example, Niklas Luhmann, Trust: A Mechanism for the Reduction of Social Complexity, in N.Luhmann: Trust and Power: Two Works (Chichester: Wiley, 1979)
1 comment:
Greg,
Thanks. Yes I have heard of Relevanta but not actually had time to look at it closely. Hoping to do that soon and will certainly provide you with input once I have.
Cheers,
Farez
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